Nearly forty thrilling, first-hand accounts by men and women who are the modern heirs of the great explorers of previous ages.

* Subtitled 'An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson', this is a true story of a man's rediscovery of his mentor - a book about second chances.

The bizarre and little known story of how a hubristicArchduke became the puppet Emperor of Mexico -with tragic results and pivotal historical consequencesfor Europe and America.

The remarkable story of the American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope famously unpicks the threads of a shroud at night to put off marrying a hapless suitor. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Philomela weaves the story of her rape into a tapestry after she is deprived of the power of speech. Male writers were generally happy to imagine mythological women turning their daily chores into creative exercises in self-expression. It did not always occur to men that real women might be up to something just as interesting. These women, the missing t...

The Financial Times - Best books of 2022: Politics

'The prolific military chronicler and analyst Mark Galeotti has produced exactly the right book at the right time.' The Times

A new history of how Putin and his conflicts have inexorably reshaped Russia, including his devastating invasion of Ukraine.

Putin's Wars is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the...

A single-volume history told in a new way: mingling grand sweep narrative with deep-core, local, personal stories – all woven together with landscape history and the author’s own travel journals.

A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century.

'A triumph of writing and scholarship. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story' - William Dalrymple, Financial Times

'A fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire . . . drawn in dazzling technicolour' - Spectator

'Beautifully written and masterfully researched,...